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132 “Bound and Gagged with Thread” Shame, Female Development, and the Künstlerroman Tradition in Cora Sandel’s The Alberta Trilogy Patricia Moran Cora Sandel’s Alberta trilogy (Alberta and Jacob [1926], Alberta and Freedom [1931], Alberta Alone [1939]) has long been an overlooked masterpiece of women’s modernism, despite its having been available in English translation for some decades now.1 Like other texts firmly established as canonical texts of women’s modernism—Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and To the Lighthouse, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, and Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight, among others—Sandel’s trilogy blurs the boundaries between bildungsroman and künstlerroman, tracing Alberta ’s development and her “coming to writing” against a backdrop of themes common to many of these novels: the struggle against late Victorian mores that constrain female expressivity in general and female sexuality in particular; the expatriate experience of Paris, here shaped by gender, nationality, and class; the upheaval and permanent social and cultural ruptures generated by the First World War; and the multiple obstacles that impede female artistry, ranging from the gendered division of domestic labor to the active discouragement of women’s ambitions to the crippling demands of maternity.2 Shame theory provides a particularly useful lens through which to read Alberta’s odyssey to artistry, for Alberta’s experiences as woman and (would-be) writer are resolutely cast as shame-infused: shame is in many ways the biggest impediment Alberta must overcome in order to claim her autonomy and an identity as a writer. Indeed , it would not be an overstatement to say that shame is both an integral element of Alberta’s identity and an integral aspect of her literary vocation, for Sandel makes clear that interpersonal relations are not only the source of Alberta’s abject and abased selfimage , but are also the basis of her narrative imagination. In the moment when Alberta first recognizes her vocation, significantly, she does so by articulating a vision of narrative that specifically situates her experiences of “pain . . . vain longing . . . disappointed 9 “Bound and Gagged with Thread” | 133 hope . . . anxiety and privation . . . the sudden numbing blows”—all experiences of self in relation to others—as “knowledge of life. Bitter and difficult, exhausting to live through, but the only way to knowledge of herself and others” (2:226–227); this insight follows her sudden realization that “[f]or some reason she knew more about people and their relationships than before” (2:226). While the exact narrative content of Alberta’s novel remains unstated, the biographical component which typically underwrites the bildungsroman/künstlerroman form suggests that the novel-to-be that Alberta envisions in print at the end of the trilogy is the text we hold in our hands: Alberta’s journey to artistic and personal autonomy is, in many respects, a journey through shame. Sandel’s depiction of shame as an integral component of her representative female artist (and as an integral component of the story that artist has to tell) has important ramifications for an understanding of female shame in women’s modernism and for an understanding of female shame more generally. Sandel focuses the trilogy on three distinct years of Alberta’s life: the first volume, Alberta and Jacob, foregrounds one year in the teenage Alberta’s life in a provincial town in northern Norway in the waning years of the nineteenth century; it highlights the ways in which the interpersonal dynamics of family life, reinforced and informed by social and cultural mores, mold Alberta’s understanding and expectations of self-other relationships. The second volume, Alberta and Freedom, set in Paris before the First World War, takes up Alberta’s story some eight or so years later: now in her twenties and living a marginal life financed by demeaning jobs as an artist’s model and by occasional newspaper articles, Alberta finds herself increasingly lonely and hence vulnerable to the seeming imperative that she needs to involve herself with someone romantically; the volume ends with her discovery that she is pregnant by a man for whom she feels repulsion and with whom she has been intimate out of gratitude and loneliness. The third volume, Alberta Alone, which opens in a seaside town in France and unfolds mostly in a Paris irrevocably changed by the war, closes in the rural countryside of Norway: here Alberta finally finishes her manuscript and, fueled by her determination to strike out on her own and make...

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